Thursday, December 17, 2009



British supermarket yanks Christmas card after redheads complain

This seems a bit nutty to Americans and Australians but it is a serious issue in England. In England only, to my knowledge, redheads do get picked on, and not only at school. It's probably a relic of hostility to Scots and the Irish, among whom red hair is fairly common. See here. Blacks and Muslims are protected but not redheads.
"Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco apologised on Tuesday after complaints that a Christmas card it sold was offensive to people with ginger hair. The card in question shows a child with red hair sitting on the lap of Santa Claus under the banner: ‘Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones.’

Davinia Phillips, whose three children all have red hair, was enraged when she saw the card at one of Tesco’s stores in northern England. ‘It’s discrimination, pure and simple. I have shown it to a lot of friends and they are all disgusted by it,’ she was quoted by newspapers as saying. ‘I just don’t find it funny at all. If it had been about a black child or an overweight child the store would have been shut down by now.’

Tesco said the offending card had now been withdrawn from all its stores.”

Source


Update:

I am probably being a bit maudlin but I want to post here a small memoir of my late father -- Frank Edward Ray -- who was a redhead. He was a lumberjack by trade in the days before chainsaws. So he was accustomed to cutting down huge forest trees with just an axe and a crosscut saw. As a result he developed huge biceps. He was a natural gentleman (far more so than I will ever be) but he did have a short temper. So if anyone "dissed" him they would be in great danger of getting flattened. And with the biceps he had behind his punch, they would stay flattened for some time. In Australian parlance he was a "king hitter". So that was one redhead who was treated with great respect by those with whom he came in contact.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe using the "redhead" was a subtle way to avoid saying "black" or "Muslim" and then be subject to hate-crime rules, or was a form of satire in that direction.

Anonymous said...

I'm digressing from my normal stance here by saying that whoever approved the slogan, 'Santa loves all kids. Even ginger ones.' was really a moron. Unless, of course, it was one of those attention-getting ploys to get publicity.

Anonymous said...

This is simply more evidence showing how incredibly stupid and weak-minded people have become since they have allowed political correctness to rule them.

On the other hand, everyone today knows how profitable being "offended" can be.

Tidford Tatt said...

The "politically correct" left is interested in protecting certain, but only certain, groups. Redheads, being almost uniquely of northern European are last on the list for "equal protection."

Thus the joke:

"What's the difference between a terrorist and a redhead?" - "You can negotiate with a terrorist."

Acceptable around the water cooler, but imagine if this joke were made concerning a pc-protected racial group – off to mandated sensitivity training classes.

Is there substantial anti-redhead violence occurring? Check it out for yourself. Google “kick a redhead day” and “kick a ginger day”.

I heard about this from some redhead school kids I know. I don’t know how real the stories I heard are, but I do know they are outraged, but they are more afraid. So afraid that they don’t want to go to schools, and angry that the threats they have received are being giggled at by their PC institutions.

They are, of course, not the “right” minority.

Bobby said...

Well, in Florida they not only kick jews and gingers, now they kick tall people as well.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/134628

Personally, I think it's stupid for a supermarket to make fun of their customers.

Anonymous said...

Maybe using the "redhead" was a subtle way to avoid saying "black" or "Muslim" and then be subject to hate-crime rules, or was a form of satire in that direction.

2:28 AM

This discrimination has been going on for generations. It is not "codespeak" for some other ethnic group

Anonymous said...

I think it's rather silly. I was with a redheaded woman, (a "real" redhead) and i must say, "it" was ugly!

Anonymous said...

QUOTABLE QUOTES

The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: the fact that Christmas has been commercialized. The gift-buying . . . stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure. And the street decorations put up by department stores and other institutions—the Christmas trees, the winking lights, the glittering colors—provide the city with a spectacular display, which only “commercial greed” could afford to give us. One would have to be terribly depressed, or a Leftist, to resist the wonderful gaiety of that spectacle.
– Ayn Rand

Anonymous said...

red hair occurs in all races , not just Europeans .
i.e. Genghis Khan , King David of Israel , Shaka Zulu all had red hair .
A curios thing about red heads . There is a greater percentage of them among the aristocracy than are with the general population .
Genetically among the red heads there is a brain chemistry not found in the rest of us that has the effect of raising the mental capacity as well as the aggressiveness of the individual .
It seems God marked them so as to say " keep an eye on this one they have sumpin goin for them " .

Anonymous said...

Zulu King Shaka of Natal had black hair. It appeard red because of plant-based dyes that were applied. Red hair does not "naturally" occur in blacks.

Anonymous said...

Quite often red colored hair is the result of one parent being dark-haired and one fair-haired (as in the case of Prince Harry so much discussed on this site!).